Behold, the cover artwork for EMPOWERED: ANIMAL STYLE, the latest one-shot installment of my ongoing "sexy superhero comedy" series published by Dark Horse Comics. This 32pp "floppy" comic is due out on June 5, and can be pre-ordered from your Local Comics Retailer RIGHT NOW, FOLKS, which I strongly recommend; otherwise, your Local Comics Retailer might not bother to stock a copy of the book. Alternatively, the comic can be pre-ordered online from Dark Horse's retail website here: [link]

The main story in EMPOWERED: ANIMAL STYLE features tech-intensive line art by mecha maestro John Staton, aka deviantART's own , who drew all the heavy metal supervillains on this cover illo. Yours truly all provided the line art for the cover's images of our often-struggling heroine Empowered (at left and right), and Rob Porter, aka dA's own painted all the pretty, pretty color work.

For the record, I'm also drawing 6pp of B&W art to accompany the main story; plus, the issue is slated to feature a 2-page preview of the next Empowered one-shot (a Ninjette-focused story), about which I'm pretty darn excited as well. I should further note that Guest Artist John Staton went way, way above and beyond the call of duty in his design work for the story, which I wrote specifically for his tech-savvy skill set. He cranked out a quite frankly insane total of 40-odd pages of designs for the one-shot's mecha and superhero vehicles, which I'll be straggling out over the weeks to come.

In closing, I must of course paste in the requisite general-purpose Emp-related floggery: Print copies of Empowered's first seven volumes (and a pair of one-shots in comics format) can be found on the shelves of your Local Comics Retailer or bookstore, or online at Dark Horse's retail website [link] or on Amazon.com [link] .

All the existing Empowered books can be purchased rather more cheaply in digital form as well, via the Dark Horse Digital store: [link]

Excited over this issue. Big fan of Robaato's work. I haven't picked it up yet, but I will. In the last one shot, some of the color shots of Emp seemed to be drawn in a slightly modified style which I thought was an interesting change of pace. Wonder if I'll see that again.

Whenever I get the chance, I just open up my dogeared Roget's Thesaurus and/or Webster's Dictionary and page idly through, searching for any word or phrase that could possibly yield yet another goofy-ass "supranym." Time-consuming but fun, in a mildly obsessive way.

Something I just noticed: if you take the Spider-Woman costume and remove all of the yellow parts, except for the triangles on her chest and forehead, and turn the red parts black, you get Empowered's costume. They've even got the same white blank eyes and mask line.